Читать книгу Our Master: Thoughts for Salvationists about Their Lord - Bramwell Booth - Страница 11

The new Century will demand high standards, both of character and conduct.

Explain it how we may, the fact is evident that religion has greatly disappointed the world. The wretched distortion of Christ's teaching which appears in the lives and business of tens of thousands of professed Christians, the namby-pambyism of the mass of Christian teachers towards the evil of sin, and the unholy union, in nearly all the practical proceedings of life, between the world and the bulk of the Christian churches, no doubt largely account for this, so far as Christianity is concerned.

Mohammedanism is in a still worse plight, for though, alas! it increases even faster than Christianity, it is helpless at the heart. The mass of its devotees know that between its highest teaching and its best practice there is a great gulf, and they are slowly beginning to look elsewhere for rules by which to guide their lives.

And what is true of Mohammedanism is true also of Buddhism--the great religion of the East. Its teachers have largely ceased to be faithful to their own faith; and, as a consequence, that faith is a declining power. Beautiful as much of its teaching undoubtedly is, millions who are nominally Buddhist are estranged by its failures; and are, with increasing unrest, looking this way and that for help in the battle with evil, and for hope amidst the bitter consciousness of sin.

Such is a cursory view of the attitude of the opening century towards the great faiths of the world. Perhaps one word more than another sums it all up--especially as regards Christianity--and that word is NEGLECT--cold, stony neglect!

And yet men are still demanding standards of life and conduct. The open materialist, the timid agnostic, no less than the avowedly selfish, the vicious and the vile, are asking, with a hundred tongues and in a thousand ways, "Who will show us any good?" The universal conscience, unbribed, unstifled as on the fateful day in Eden--conscience, the only thing in man left standing erect when all else fell--still cries out, "YOU OUGHT!" still rebels at evil, still compels the human heart to cry for rules of right and wrong, and still urges man to the one, and withholds him from the other.

And it is--for one reason--because Jesus can provide these high standards for men, that I say He is The Man for the Century. The laws He has laid down in the Gospels, and the example He furnished of obedience to those laws in the actual stress and turmoil of a human life, afford a standard capable of universal application.

The ruler, contending with unruly men; the workman, fighting for consideration from a greedy employer; the outcast, struggling like an Ishmaelite with Society for a crust of bread; the dark-skinned, sad-eyed mother, sending forth her only babe to perish in the waters of the sacred river of India, thus "giving the fruit of her body for the sin of her soul"; the proud and selfish noble, abounding in all he desires except the one thing needful; the great multitude of the sorrowful, which no man can number, who refuse to be comforted; the dying, whose death will be an unwilling leap in the dark--all these, yea, and all others, may find in the law of Christ that which will harmonise every conflicting interest, which will solve the problems of human life, which will build up a holy character, which will gather up and sanctify everything that is good in every faith and in every man, and will unite all who will obey it in the one great brotherhood of the one fold and the one Shepherd.